this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Prices are a matter of supply and demand.
Housing starts plunged during the Great Recession, and recovered to only mediocre levels. However, over that time the population continued to grow.
We fundamentally have a housing shortage, particularly in places people want to live. One massive problem is that it's currently quite difficult to build net-new housing in places people want to live, due to a combination of overly-restrictive zoning and NIMBYs who ate empowered to block new projects.
The problem is particularly bad in popular urban areas. Either you build outwards or you build upwards. But if someone wants to live "in Boston", "in NYC", etc, they probably don't want to live in a new build an hour's drive away from the city in traffic. And infill development is generally highly regulated.
Adding a price ceiling without fixing the underlying shortage is going to benefit the people currently living in an area, but it will make it harder to find a new unit. Adding units isn't the only important thing, but it's pretty important.
I live in the north area of the San Francisco Bay Area and there is a shocking number of new builds happening right now. Soooooo many apartment complexes and housing developments. It seems like every day another one has begun. Just on the street I work on there have been three very large apartment complexes put in where there used to be businesses within the last two years. On my 8 mile commute home I pass four more, where there used to be pasture land. This area is known for it's NIMBYs but laws have been passed (by voters) requiring more housing and it's happening.
There are 25 empty houses for every homeless person in the US. There are people like Bezos who own multiple $25 million dollar mansions, that sit empty 300+ days a year. There are places with housing shortages, but that is not the case nationwide. The problem is that our government cares little to ensure adequate housing for its population. It sees absolutely no issue in allowing property to be hoarded by the rich and used to strangle the poor.
That's one of those things that's technically true, but quite misleading.
The number of houses you could reasonably move homeless people into tomorrow is much smaller than the number of vacant houses. Unless you suggest putting homeless people in buildings undergoing renovation, in new houses that are almost done being constructed, in houses that were sold but have the new owners moving in next week, in rental units that have been on the market for a month, or in your grandmother's house after she dies while the estate is being settled. Or into chalets on a ski hill, into seasonally occupied employee housing, etc.
The vacancy rate includes basically everything that isn't currently someone's primary residence on whichever day the census uses for their snapshot. Low vacancy rates are actually a bad thing and are bad for affordability. Very high vacancy rates are also bad, but you want there to be a decent number of vacant houses.
Do you have a source for all of this?
https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/index.html
You can check out https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/definitions.pdf
In particular, vacant housing is either for sale, for rent, rented or sold, for occasional use, or held off market.
Categories for held off market include forclosure, personal/family reasons (which includes e.g. units where the owner moved into assisted living or is currently living elsewhere with family), legal reasons (e.g. divorce or code violations), preparing to rent/sell, held for storage of household furniture, needs repair, currently under repair, specific use housing (e.g. dorms), extended absence (e.g. prison), abandoned/possibly condemned, and 'don't know'.
Their data tables are broken up kinda weirdly, and each table is its own sheet which is unfortunate to look at on mobile. A ton of things are reported as percents or rates, and I kinda wish they had the detailed raw numbers broken out better.
I might not want to put them in buildings under renovation, but those empty mansions could serve as compounds to house hundreds of people safely and securely, while having adequate space to offer necessities for transitioning back to housed life, such as on site therapy and pharmacies, and work aid centers.
Housing-first is a great way to deal with homelessness, because most of the problems homeless people have in rebuilding their lives are compounded by being on the street. I'm not saying we shouldn't house homeless people.
I'm saying that comparing the vacancy rate to the homeless population is ridiculous, and isn't evidence that there's no housing shortage.
Partially, that's because vacant houses aren't all habitable, or able to be sold/rented immediately. But also, it's because having some number of empty units on the market ready to be moved into is a good thing. You don't want to have to find someone who wants to move out the day you want to move in. That creates a sellers market, causing high prices.
Fun fact: homeless people can't afford mansions.
Build them places to rent.
Fun fact: Every mansion or luxury condo built is 100+ affordable units not being built.
We’re building at record rates in many places, but just building housing does nothing but line the pockets of developers, because they will always choose to prioritize more profitable ventures, and current methods of requiring a small single digit percentage of their units to be “affordable” aren’t cutting it.
We need to be specific in what we’re building, and who we’re building it for. People moving in from out of state with high paying jobs are often prioritized by city and county governments because they increase the tax base, but this simultaneously raises rents for all of the current residents in crises as the market is dragged up. If we’re not specifically building affordable housing for local residents within each effected community to the best of our ability, then we’re only going to exacerbate the issue further. I’ve lived through “just build more” in my state for 20 years, I know how it goes.
If you build any housing at all, you are opening up "affordable housing" at the bottom of the totem pole. That's how buying houses works.
No one is going to build a dumpster apartment to rent on the cheap. There's no incentive there.
Let people build and the less-desirable homes will be scooped up as prices fall. It's basic supply and demand.
Your state, like mine, has probably been kneecapping development in favor of NIMBY policies for those 20 years
No, they haven’t. They’ve been working hand in hand with developers to entice new money for them to tax, and ignoring the poor who only get poorer.
What does that have to do with this discussion?
Knocking down single-family or small unit homes to build more multi-family housing is a good thing actually.
Sounds like you need to vote locally to remove single-family exclusionary zoning policies
Dope man I love that. Keep that energy goin and proselytize.
Also don't forget that people don't like housing built near them because it "drives down housing prices." Homeowners themselves are more a problem than corporations are.
In much of the country, even smaller towns, the problem is that supply and demand is being artificially manipulated by corporations from outside the area coming in, outbidding locals, then putting what we're owner occupied homes on the market for jacked up rent prices. This encourages other local landlords to charge more, because they can.
Corporations are able to do that because housing is a good investment.
Part of the reason it's been a good investment is due to things like exclusive mcmansion zoning. Just imagine if it were easy to build net-new houses in those communities. Developers could make a killing building new housing, and extorting corporations into buying it.
There's only so many people willing and able to pay sky high rents. At some price, people move into their parents basement, double up, become homeless, etc. So corporations have two options: either they continue to outbid average Joes or they don't. If they don't, then people won't be forced to rent from them. If they do, at some point the new housing will just go vacant unless they lower prices.
Owning vacant housing has costs, but little upside. As a larger and larger percentage of their portfolio becomes vacant, housing becomes a worse and worse investment for them. At some point, it's unsustainable, they have sell, the market collapses, and rent becomes cheap. They literally can't sit on an unlimited amount of vacant housing and remain solvent.
That's a fair assessment and I agree with your prediction at the end. I think the problem is that, in the meantime, there massive real-world harm being done to people by these practices that have potentially generation spanning consequences (much like redlining).
The point more is that corporations jacking up rents is more of a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem isn't corporations. It's that we've normalized NIMBYs artificially inflating their home value.
There are more direct solutions, like building deed-restricted affordable housing, public housing, etc.
Then we need master lists of who currently lives in an area and for how much, and who wants to live in an area based on housing bids, homeless populations, etc., like with an application or something.
Or, hear me out on this, we could build more housing.
We could do this by upzoning basically the whole city, and by disempowering NIMBYs. Make it so that every location can build just a bit more densely, by right (i.e. where the approval is automatic).
Make it so you can build triplexes by right in what was an exclusively single family zoned area. Take areas with apartments and let them build a few stories taller. Let neighborhoods evolve into density over a decade or two.